Saturday, July 29, 2017

The U.S. mainstream media continues to spread its own “fake news,” like the falsehood about an intelligence community “consensus” on Russia-gate “hacking,” as algorithms begin to marginalize dissent, reports Robert Parry.

"It seems that The New York Times can’t let a good lie lie. Even after being pushed into running an embarrassing correction retracting its false claim that there was a consensus of all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies that Russia hacked Democratic emails and made them public to help Donald Trump defeat Hillary Clinton, the Times is back suggesting exactly that."

PBS’ Anti-Russia Propaganda Series(ConsortiumNews.com)PBS has joined the anti-Russia propaganda stampede with a five-part documentary series that recycles the false and deceptive claims that have become Official Washington’s dangerous new groupthink, reports Rick Sterling."The PBS documentary “Inside Putin’s Russia” aims to expose Russian repression, aggression and disinformation. As shown in the many examples above, the five-part documentary is highly biased and inaccurate. While it shows some features of Russia, it also demonstrates American propaganda in the current tumultuous times."

The United States has entered a period of politics without euphemisms, a no-holds-barred frontal assault on democratic values, institutions and social relations, wrapped up in the discourse of greed and practices characteristic of an authoritarian mode of governance.

Giroux ends by talking about the need for a comprehensive politics that rejects the two-party system and relies upon young people and others in order to rewrite the script of democracy through sustainable social movement dedicated to democratic socialism.

******

Mickey Huff is the current director of Project Censored, founded in 1976, and president of the Media Freedom Foundation. To date, he has edited or coedited nine volumes of Censored (published by Seven Stories Press in New York) and contributed numerous chapters to these works dating back to 2008. He is currently professor of social science and history at Diablo Valley College in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he is cochair of the history department; and a lecturer in the communications department at California State University, East Bay. Huff is cohost with former Project Censored director Peter Phillips of The Project Censored Show, the weekly syndicated public affairs program that began in 2010, which originates from the historic studios of KPFA Pacifica Radio in Berkeley CA, and airs on 40 stations around the country from Maui to New York.

Tuesday, July 25, 2017

THE BUSINESS OF WAR

Military conflict (war) transfers huge sums of money through taxes from the populace into the hands of war profiteers, the banks, the weapons makers, and other parasites.

If you consider the cost and accrued debt resulting from war over the last century, weighed against any conceivable benefit to the average citizen, it simply doesn't make sense. The war machine has taken control of both the minds and resources of our nation. Although this process is tremendously harmful to the U.S., it literally destroys nations around the globe. The Military and Intelligence Industrial Complex is run by homicidal maniacs we not only allow into all of our homes by allowing them to surveil us, we pay them for the privilege. War isn't saving us from destruction, it is racing us headlong toward it.

I wonder if anyone has crunched the numbers on all the energy and cash wasted by fighting in the Middle East because of its oil reserves, compared to the savings and availability of that resource if we simply bought it from those countries. I believe the facts would show that we would have been far better off doing it the peaceful way, but the U.S. would contain a lot less billionaires.

A century of hostile activity against foes that never invaded or even threatened us has only resulted in unimaginable death and destruction, and a cauldron of global animosity. The insanity of decades of leadership bent on paranoid or self-serving war has truly fucked us all royally.

Sunday, July 23, 2017

ALEC STILL SUCKS!

The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is a well-funded very influencial cabal intent on manipulating all levels of government in the U.S., from local counsels to the halls of the Capitol in D.C.

ALEC pushes corporate agendas and serves the interests of the very wealthy, at the expense of the vast majority. They write boiler plate legislation that is distributed throughout the country and presented as original law by bought politicians, and this legislation is uniformly insidious. If they didn't wield such power they would be investigated as a criminal enterprise.

The government representatives ALEC controls should be investigated for taking bribes and violating oaths of office. Organizations like ALEC and the efforts of Koch Industries, and the dark monied political action committees (PACS) are among the greatest threats to what's left of our democracy and the well-being of common folk here and everywhere.

Saturday, July 15, 2017

"Former financial regulator Bill Black offers bankers a challenge: Step forward if you support the new rule issued by The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau allowing consumers to bring about class-action litigation against banks who defraud them."

(The Real News.com)

Bill Black:

"The problem in consumer finance, lending, is that it is so easy for unscrupulous lenders to cheat, as we've just seen with Wells Fargo and we saw all through the crisis. Well if they cheat, economic theory tells us this creates a Gresham's dynamic, in which bad ethics drives good ethics out of the marketplace. In other words, you gain a competitive advantage by cheating, then market forces will cause the cheaters to dominate the industry, which is why finance is so corrupt. So when you stop them from cheating, and the rule that the bureau adopted is one way of reducing the incentives to cheat, then you actually help not just the consumers who directly deal with the lenders, but also all the honest bankers who would like to do the right thing and can't unless we restore the rule of law."

Wednesday, July 12, 2017

MAX KEISER

The Keiser Report

Every week Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert look at all the scandal behind the financial news headlines.

Few topics are as critical to our every day lives as business and economics, and just as few are so boring and buried in bullshit. Max is among a few that are able to add humor, like a sweetener, to ease the swallowing of bitter financial pills.

"In this episode of the Keiser Report from Mexico City, Max and Stacy discuss the emergence of ‘oligarchic America’ as Amazon eats Whole Foods. In the second half, Max interviews economist and columnist Alejandro Nadal about Trump’s wall and exiting from the NAFTA trade deal."

"On tonight’s Big Picture, Thom talks with Richard Wolff about the Fed's plan to begin unwinding a stimulus within months. Then, he talks with Bryan Pruitt and Doug Christian about a recent poll that found the majority of GOPers think colleges are bad for America, and that somehow we can afford military jets, but not universal healthcare. Plus, a planned day of action for net-neutrality."

I usually enjoy Thom's interviews, especially with Richard Wolff, but his panel discussions always showcase a conservative pinhead, who is invariably annoying. I wonder if Thom gives them a platform simply to showcase how empty and inept their rhetoric tends to be.

Tuesday, July 11, 2017

"The FCC wants to destroy net neutrality and give big cable companies
control over what we see and do online. If they get their way, they’ll
allow widespread throttling, blocking, censorship, and extra fees.

"MICHAEL COPPS: Well, first of all, the network is so vital to economic opportunity and innovation, and especially to democracy. I think Evan said it well. This is a tool of unparalleled power that can help us to build democracy. When you look at what has happened to mainstream media—radio, television and cable—how it has been corporatized and commercialized and consolidated, how much journalism we have lost, you really get down to the essential question: Is media providing the news and information that citizens need in order to make intelligent decisions for the future? There’s a lot of evidence that that’s really not happening right now.

Net neutrality, however, is a free speech issue. And at its center is the ability of Americans to go where they want on the internet, to access the content that they want and to be treated like everybody else is treated, so you don’t have Comcast and AT&T and Verizon acting as gatekeepers and having the power to slow down sites that they don’t like or to block or to throttle, or to give fast lanes to a few while the rest of us struggle along on slow lanes. To be a fully participating citizen in 21st century America, you have to have access to high-speed, affordable broadband. And that’s what’s at issue now."

Monday, July 10, 2017

DR. DAVID SUZUKI

"The problem today is that we're constantly left with saying, "Well, you environmentalists, you want to do this. What about the jobs? You're going to destroy the economy." We had a prime minister for 9-1/2 years who said we can't do anything about climate change, it'll destroy the economy. I don't think he believed that climate change was real, but Stephen Harper elevated ... the very air that keeps us alive, he elevated the economy above that. If that isn't suicidal, I don't know what is."